Aston Martin Racing will start the Autosport 6 Hours, round five of
the 2011 Intercontinental Le Mans Cup, from 12th on the grid after
difficult and changeable weather conditions in today’s qualifying
session. The team’s Gulf-liveried DBR1-2 LMP1 clocked a best time of
1m52.151s in the hands of Mexican Adrian Fernandez, who will share the
#007 car with Austrian Christian Klien and Swiss Harold Primat in
tomorrow’s event.

With the 25-minute session beginning in
damp conditions, Fernandez started on slick tyres to give the team the
best chance with changeable weather looming but opted to pit with seven
minutes remaining. The team decided against sending the car out due to
worsening conditions.

Fernandez said: “We went out early
because we thought that was our best chance. It started raining so to
get a lap in it was better to do it early. My tyres were very cold and I
really struggled in the first few laps to get them up to temperature.
It was really a short margin because it started to rain harder towards
the end. The main thing for us is to drive tomorrow – it’s practice for
everybody and hopefully we can have a solid race, be at the end and have
a good result.”

In the closely-fought GT classes, the
Jota Aston Martin V8 Vantage GT2 of Brits Chris Buncombe, Simon Dolan
and Sam Hancock qualified 11th in GT-Pro, with a best time of 2m03.433s,
while the Gulf AMR Middle East Vantage GT2 of Fabien Giroix (F), Roald
Goethe (D) and Michael Wainwright (GB) took seventh in GT-Am with a
2m06.976s.

Meanwhile, in the GT1 World Championship, Young
Driver AMR experienced the biggest success in the team’s history at the
inaugural race in Beijing. The German Aston Martin team took a double
victory in the qualifying race and again in the championship race in
very difficult wet conditions. Stefan Mücke (D) and Darren Turner (GB)
claimed their first win of the season in a championship race in their
Young Driver AMR-Aston Martin DBR9 and came second in the qualifying
race, while Alex Müller (D) and Tomas Enge (CZ) won the qualifying race
and finished second in the championship race in the Gulf-liveried Aston
Martin DBR9. With the dominant performance in China, Young Driver AMR
leads the teams’ championship with the final round to come in Argentina.

The
Autosport 6 Hours of Silverstone starts at 1135 BST tomorrow (Sunday).
Radio Le Mans will be broadcasting live race coverage at
www.radiolemans.com and Aston Martin updates can be found at
www.astonmartinracing.com with additional behind the scenes updates on
Facebook; www.facebook.com/astonmartin and through Twitter at
www.twitter.com/astonmartin.